Hebrew: connecting more of the dots

[cellio]

I had another "aha" moment with Hebrew tonight.

There are certain endings that, when added onto a noun (maybe with some minor vowel tweaks), make that noun possessive -- "levavecha" = "levav" (heart) + "-echa" (your, masculine, singular) = "your heart", or "nafshi" = "nefesh" (soul) + "-i" (my) = "my soul". The endings are kind of, sort of related to the personal pronouns; in some cases it's a clear subset ("I", "ani", "-i"; "they", "hem", "-hem") and in others the connection is a little more tenuous ("you (M, S)", "atah", "-echa"). All that is stuff I knew and often recognized in text.

The "aha" is that it's not just nouns that can get this treatment. There an is untranslatable marker for the direct object, "et", so you get "$verb [$subject] et $object". But if the direct object is a personal pronoun, you don't write "et $pronoun" -- which would technically be bad grammar, as you'd be writing things like "Moshe sent I" instead of "Moshe sent me". But I hadn't really thought much about pronouns.

So, how do you make a pronoun a direct object? By pasting the ending onto the "et" that's just sitting there. Moshe sent oti. (The vowel changes from "e" to "o". It's just one of those things. Vowels are kind of fickle sometimes; you learn to read from the consonants.)

I've been seeing "oto" and "otam" and the occasional "otecha" all over the place, most recently in the torah portion I'm learning now (for next week). And I recognized them as sort of mutant possessives -- I knew they weren't really possessives but I got the personal-pronoun bits out of them, but I completely missed the "et"s that were carrying them, and thus missed that they were direct objects. Heh.

But there's more. I already knew, anecdotally, that some prepositions could be combined with these pronoun derivatives -- "li" is "for me" ("l'" + "ani"), "lanu" is "for us", etc. I had assumed these were just contractions, just as "l'" itself is a contraction of "el". But it's actually the same principle at work, and the endings are the possessive endings, not from the base pronouns themselves. They're similar, but not identical.

I now grok a rule that's much broader than the cases I'd figured out on my own (or been told about singly). This small bit feels like it opens up a disproportionately-large body of text. Maybe that's just because my next parsha is full of these, but I don't think it's just that.

There is a fine art between front-loading the rules and letting them appear after you've seen enough instances "in the wild". It's possible that someone (Dani or my rabbi) might have even told me some of this already, but early enough that I filed it away (mentally) instead of seeing applications for it. I've complained in the past about the conversational-Hebrew class I took some years ago where the teacher just would not give me a freaking rule no matter how much I asked; I have some insight now into what she was doing. Just giving the rules up front wouldn't have been productive; my complaint, in hindsight, is that she delayed too long, not that she didn't offer it up in the first class.

The book I'm working through seems to be doing a very good job of introducing rules at just the right time. Of course the book can't control my outside reading; if I were working just with the book I probably wouldn't have noticed that nicety. But the flow of applicable rules is balancing nicely with my own attempts to read, so that probably means they've made good choices about both pacing and ordering. Kudos.

Edit: I'm guessing that a similar rule applies to indirect objects and verbs. "Baruch...she'asani yisrael" is "blessed... that/who made (m, s) made me a Jew". There are also verbs like "zochreinu" (remember us), and at first blush "us" appears to be a direct and not indirect object, but maybe it's literally closer to "remember unto us [something]". None of which explains actual pronouns appended to verbs, as in "halleluhu", where "hu" (he) seems to function as a direct object, but oh well. In time...

Comments

[siderea]

I've complained in the past about the conversational-Hebrew class I took some years ago where the teacher just would not give me a freaking rule no matter how much I asked; I have some insight now into what she was doing. Just giving the rules up front wouldn't have been productive; my complaint, in hindsight, is that she delayed too long, not that she didn't offer it up in the first class.

If you wanted to come here and beat up my programming students with that particular clue stick, I wouldn't mind at all....

[cellio]

What, you're expecting programming students to be patient? :-)

If you introduce the rules too early there are problems, but if you introduce them too late there are also (different) problems -- mainly that the student will derive them himself, but perhaps incorrectly, and then have to unlearn that. The challenge, I suspect, is that this magic spot is determined by the combination of the teacher and the student; it's not just that a given student is ready at this time, but that a given student is ready at this time with this teacher. Or, at the very least, it's highly dependent on the student. If that's true, the chance of this ever working out right in a classroom is near nil.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

What helped me years ago was deciding to think of it as conjugation. As in, you conjugate prepositions as well as verbs in Hebrew.

[cellio]

Thanks -- that does help!